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Abstract
Clifford Geertz was best known for his pioneering excursions into symbolic or in terpretive anthropology, especially in relation to Indonesia. Less well recognised are his stimulating explorations of the modern economic history of Indonesia. His thinking on the interplay of economics and culture was most fully and vigorously expounded in Agricultural Involution. That book deployed a succinctly packaged past in order to solve a pressing contemporary puzzle, Java's enduring rural poverty and apparent social immobility. Initially greeted with acclaim, later and ironically the book stimulated the deep and multi-layered research that in fact led to the eventual rejection of Geertz's central contentions. But the veracity or otherwise of Geertz's inventive characterisation of Indonesian economic development now seems irrelevant; what is profoundly important is the extraordinary stimulus he gave to a generation of scholars to explore Indonesia's modern economic history with a depth and intensity previously unimaginable.
Notes
1‘100 tokoh Indonesia abad XX [100 Indonesian figures of the 20th century]’, Forum Keadilan [Justice Forum], edisi khusus [special issue], 9 January 2000, especially p. 80.
2Geertz's witty, drily self-effacing reminiscences of the tensions and misunderstandings that accompanied the arrival of the team in Yogyakarta, and its eventual re-siting to Pare, may be found in Geertz (Citation1995: 104–9).
3See, for example, the approving reviews by Smail (Citation1965) and Wertheim (Citation1964).
4So beguiling was the prose, indeed, that at least one of his critics was accused of paying ‘implicit tribute to the master in language which echoes his thought and style’ (Day Citation1986: 148).
5See, for example, Van Gorkom (Citation1866: 395). G.H. van der Kolff (Citation1953: 194) pointed to what he saw as the role of the colonial sugar industry in preventing the emergence of an entrepreneurial Javanese middle class. See also Allen and Donnithorne (Citation1957: 81–2).
6I have recently noticed, for example, Yoshiyuki Sato, Agricultural Involution in Late Imperial Russia: Reality and Transformation (Sato Citation2006).
7It seems difficult to appreciate now just how limited Australia's expertise on Indonesia was at this point. It was only in the 1970s that a new generation of graduate students, people like Crouch, Ingleson and Dick, began their earliest work on Indonesia. Few knew what sources might be available to them in the archives in the Netherlands. Even less was known of the Indonesian archives; as far as I am aware, I was one of the very first Australians (or foreigners, for that matter) to be permitted systematic use of those archives in 1976.